The lake is still and the stars are mammoth. She glides beneath the surface, a dark form he can follow but cannot see until she passes through starlight, this long-limbed woman who had been his wife — sweeping arc of arms, black tongue of hair, pincer thrust of legs — appearing and vanishing, as she swims constellations.

A crying baby yanks him from the dream, but there is no baby, merely wind troubling the lake, the metallic complaint of the trailer, a woman’s mournful, amused voice: “. . . sort of like a battleground seen from the air.” She holds a…